The Budget Speech Is NOT the Budget (Part One)

Don’t feel sad if you can’t always follow what goes on in Parliament. But if MPs are stumped by the lack of best practices during Budget Day, then we should worry.

Parliament must appear very strange for the uninitiated. After all, the Westminster system that Malaysia models itself after is an old and quaint one. There are many weird practices involved, such as the thumping of tables, addressing MPs by their constituencies instead of their actual names and the party whip system (to name just a few).

The first thing I did after becoming a Member of Parliament was to buy and attempt to read Erskine May. And of course I didn’t manage to finish the 1,000-page book.1 But I did get a gist of the so-called “parliamentary practices”. The English parliament is even weirder than I initially thought.

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